Above-Average and Character-Driven

Rating: 8/10 (28 October 2008)

I'm going to start off with my pettiest criticism so that you'll forget how cheap I am by the time you're finished reading: This movie starts off by establishing that animal rights activists are at fault for spreading the "rage" virus because they set lab animals free from their cages, only to find out too late that they've been turned into foaming, savage predators. I'm not saying that Alex Garland, the screenwriter, vilified animal rights activists on purpose, but isn't that the overall effect of the scene? That they're ignorant, malevolent anarchists who don't know what they're doing and cause massive destruction? I find that highly contemptible. But the rest of the film is fine.
I remember when this film was released it was a breakthrough for both Cillian Murphy and the use of grainy, gritty digital video cinematography in mainstream movies. By now, we've already been introduced to the latter. When the former awakens in an empty hospital and leaves, he finds a forsaken London. In a sequence of astounding shots, he wanders with not a single person within reach, seeing from old wind-beaten newspapers of a virus that twisted human beings against itself.
So opens this character-driven take on the post-apocalyptic horror movie, which starts as an above-average horror film and continues as an stimulating, however action-packed, inquiry of human nature (and yes, only human. In spite of the fact that this spread from chimps, there don't seem to be any animals that attack or are attacked by the rage-infected).
Though famously indecisive regarding how to end this movie, director Danny Boyle, who by this time had made the enduring contemporary landmark Trainspotting, gives his sci-fi drama an abrupt documentary impression, making the film scarier through being more realistic, while at the same time making the movie less expensive. It makes you wonder about the formula credibility of movies like this: A more expensive film would have had more traditional action heroes, and less screen time in what would be a less patient stride to expand the gradually familial relationship between the unusual characters, each of them being everyday people transformed by inescapable circumstance. Throw enough money into this movie's broad concept, and it would have the penetration of the Resident Evil films or the Dawn of the Dead remake. Garland's script develops characters who seem to have a reality at a distance from their part in the plot, whose behavior determines what they do, where they go, and why.
Naomie Harris's seemingly inscrutable, at first less than approachable black female becomes the bossy member of the intimate cluster, wearing the toughest and least emotional shell, imposing a hardened survivalist boundary. Timid Cillian Murphy would probably have died if he hadn't met her. Sooner or later they find solace with two other survivors: Brendan Gleeson's genial and resourceful father and his teenage daughter Hannah, of whom he is strongly protective. They've overwhelmingly fortified in a high-rise apartment, and use their hand-cranked radio to receive a broadcast from an Army unit near Manchester. Should they count on the broadcast and journey to what is illustrated as a safe haven? After some debate, the group, who seems to bond more and more every minute, resolves that the smartest thing to do is to take the chance.
In a lesser film, and almost certainly an American one, there would be a sex scene between Murphy and Harris, but Boyle and Garland's work finds the fitting pitch in an instant where she pecks him on the cheek, and he's the one that blushes.
The rage-infecteds bring up questions like, How long can one live once infected? Since London seems empty at the beginning, I assume the infecteds we see were survivors until somewhat lately. Another thought: Seeing as they run in hordes, why don't they attack one another? Its driving strand of the zombie-like outbreak seems allegorical, the film punctuates its assertion of a human's most rudimentary self in the climactic scene, which fulfills every ounce of pent-up aggression in you, the viewer, and though the third act does not quite live up to the promise of the first two, this climactic bloodbath is the highest point of the film.